Galactic Civilizations III v2.3 (base game) update

Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade is the future of Galactic Civilizations but we haven't forgotten about the hundreds of thousands of players who play the base game. We are busy working on version 2.3 which should be coming out soon as part of a major update to both the base game and Crusade. This article details some of the highlighted areas we're focusing on.

Diplomacy

Some of the improvements to the diplomacy system in Crusade have been brought back to the base game. While it's not nearly as sophisticated as what's in Crusade (the whole underlying system in Crusade was rewritten to support the new economy) it is substantially better than 2.1. This means the AI is much better at bargaining with the player and makes much better trade offers.

The improved AI diplomacy features will likely be the most obvious improvement because the AI is much better at finding things to trade rather than begging for things.

Balance

We have done a balance pass on the planetary improvements to give them a bit more oomph but also make them cost quite a bit more. Similarly, we have also made it so that specialty ships like constructors and colony ships are much expensive. While expert players know just where to set the production wheel and what to buy and when, new players are often frustrated because it takes many turns to naturally construct a colony ship using the default values.

Pacing

There are a lot more anomalies to explore early in the game than previous. And in fact, we have also substantially increased the number of planets, stars and habitable planets on the default settings.

Performance

You can't really take a screenshot of performance. While we couldn't bring over the core-neutral AI engine from Crusade, we were able to bring over some of the optimizations we made. The result is that the turn times, already quite fast, are better and the general framerate has been improved as well. When combined with the improved strategic AI, the galaxy definitely feels a lot more alive.

AI

The AI got a major uplift as well in terms of how well it plays the game. While I wouldn't say it's as good as what is in Crusade, players should notice a pretty substantial improvement in how the AI plays the game during times of war.

Could managing fleets get a look over. GalCiv 2 was much better at creating/splitting fleets and moving ships around. It was also easy to determine which ships were damaged and what their names were (helpful in knowing which damaged/obsolete ships to remove and replace). For instance, the Frigate M4's might be obsolete when I start building Frigate M9's.

Make it possible to decommission fleets of ships with either the delete or backspace button.

Could you make defense systems more like weapon systems? The specializations following weapons is either performance increase/cost decrease/size decrease for all weapon types. However, defense only gets one of those options for each defense type, so for example one option is armor size reduction -10%.

Will there be an option to turn off administrators? I liked being able to build as many starbases as I liked. I would turn admins off if I had the means to do so. There is only so many starbases you can build with techs alone. The base game doesn't have citizens like Crusade does to provide more admins.